Kazuo Ohno and Butoh
by Jack Egan
You cannot tell the dancer from the dance.” -- William Butler Yeats
Few artists are as closely identified with an art form as is centenarian dancer Kazuo Ohno with butoh. An avant-garde amalgam of dance, theater and mime, butoh emerged in the late 1950’s out of the social and artistic tumult of post-World War II Japan.
The globally-renowned Japanese performance artist—who is considered one of the most important figures in all of modern dance—Ohno turns 101 in October. That birthday is being commemorated by a series of exhibits and tributes in Japan, the United States and Europe.
Ohno was present at the creation of what was originally known as Ankoku Butoh, or “dance of utter darkness,” later abbreviated to just butoh. The single word used today in turn has a different, more elemental meaning: literally “stomping dance,” which connotes butoh’s earth-bound nature in contrast with the skyward leaps characteristic of European ballet.
As the first and foremost butoh star, Ohno served as the vessel for artistic rebel and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata. The latter codified the choreography and layed down the aesthetic foundation for butoh: fiercely avant-garde, with homoerotic and transgender tropes along with elements reminiscent of Japanese theater such as Noh drama.
Over the decades, Ohno’s butoh style steadily evolved. He drifted from the shocking grotesquerie of Hijikata’s original conception to a style more improvisational, existential, plastic in movement--and universal. Ohno, usually with face and body covered with a plaster white impasto, often androgynous in dress, he could project pathos and also humor.
Ultimately he evolved into a type of Everyman—and Everywoman. Or as he once put it, “the dancer’s costume is to wear the universe.”
Now wheel-chair bound, Ohno danced until he was in his early 90’s and then continued to teach his technique to students who journeyed from afar to his Yokohama studio, seeking inspiration along with insights into his techniques.
In his decades of dancing, he was frequently partnered by his son Yoshito, also a butoh pioneer and a notable artist in his own right. Now 69, and still at the height of his powers, Yoshito is performing a special solo butoh work at the Japan Society in New York on his father’s 101st birthday on October 27. The date has further significance because it also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Society. Kazuo Ohno gave a number of memorable performances at the Japan Society. The last was in 1999.
There’s a parallel cinematic celebration, “Kazuo Ohno: Three Decades of Butoh Dance on Film,” which takes place October 25 at the Segal Theater Center on the Manhattan campus of CUNY. Produced by John Solt of highmoonoon.com and Jeff Janisheski of CAVE, the event features afternoon and evening screenings of Ohno’s legendary 1960’s “Mr. O” films, directed by Chiaki Nagano. Several rare videos documenting complete performances are part of the program. The highmoonoon film fest is also being presented at Doshisha University in Tokyo.
The Dancer
Kazuo Ohno’s career as the world’s foremost butoh dancer really didn’t take off until the second half of his life. He first made a mark in an early butoh work when he was over 50.
Ohno was born in 1906 in Hakodate City on Hokkaido, Japan’s big northern island. He underwent a transformational experience in 1929 when he was taken to the Imperial Theater to see Spanish dancer
Antonia Merce, who had modernized flamenco. She was known as “La Argentina.” The impact she had on Ohno proved to be life-changing, triggering a desire to explore and ultimately dedicate his life to dance.
He began training with two of Japan’s foremost innovators, Baku Ishii and Takaya Eguchi. The latter had taken lessons with Mary Wigman, a pioneer in the evolution of modern dance in Europe, providing Ohno with an introduction to the techniques of “Neue Tanz.”
Ohno’s first solo performance took place in 1949 in “Jellyfish Dance,” which he choreographed. It was based on an incident while returning from his service in the Japanese military during World War II: soldiers on boats who had died of hunger and disease were thrown overboard into a sea filled with jellyfish.
Lightning struck in the mid-1950’s when the two creative founders of butoh first met: Ohno encountered Tatsumi Hijikata, the creator of butoh. Hijikata encouraged Ohno to learn the new dance he had evolved, ultimately transforming him into the world’s leading butoh artist.
The work that in 1959 put butoh on the cultural map in Japan—as a success de scandale--was “Kinjiki,” or Forbidden Colors, based on a novel by leading Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. (The word kinjiki in Japanese is also a euphemism for homosexual.) Ohno, as well as his son Yoshito, then only 21, both performed in the work. A scene in which Yoshito crushed a live chicken between his legs outraged audiences. Hijikata became infamous as the bad boy of Japanese culture.
One of Ohno’s most memorable solo performances was “La Argentina Sho” (Admiring La Argentina). Choreographed by Hijikata. It referenced the Spanish dancer who was Ohno’s initial inspiration. The work and Ohno’s interpretation grabbed attention wherever it was performed. In 1980 he was honored with the prestigious Dance Critic’s Circle Award.
Ohno’s international reputation grew during the 1980s when he conducted frequent tours through Europe, the United States, South America, Australia and Asia. In 1980 he was invited to perform in the 14th International Festival in Nancy, France. He subsequently toured London, Stuttgart, Paris and Stockholm. His first appearance in the United States was in 1981. He was encouraged to come to this country by Ellen Stewart, the founder of New York’s La Mama Experimental Theater Group.
Other important works by Ohno which Hijikata created and directed include “My Mother” and “Dead Sea Letter.” Works created and danced by Ohno include “Water Lillies,” “Ka Cho Fu Getsu” (Flowers-Birds- Wind-Moon) and “The Road in Heaven, the Road in Earth.”
Ohno has also acted in films. The most prominent roles were in three films directed by Chiago Nagano: “The Portrait of Mr. O” (1969); “Mandala of Mr. O” (1971); and “Mr. O’s Book of the Dead.” And he has authored several books on butoh including The Palace Soars through the Sky, a poetic collection of essays and captivating photographs; and Words of Workshop, based on a series of lectures he delivered.
The Dance
Butoh has been described as avant garde, surreal, primal, mystical and ritualistic. One word it’s not associated with is “traditional.” When butoh first burst on the scene in the mid-1950’s, it was even considered subversive and revolutionary. Taboo subjects were served up with relish. Conservative Japanese audiences were outraged. But the shock value helped gain it more than just notoriety. It caught the imagination of younger Japanese artists. Up to that time, Japan had not developed its own form of indigenous avant-garde dance. Modern dance companies existed in Japan, but they imitated formats and ideas initiated in Europe and the United States during earlier decades of the Twentieth Century.
One way to view butoh is as a tree, with its gnarled trunk, deep roots and many branches. The trunk is composed of the innovations and teachings of Tatsumi Hijikata and the performances of Kazuo Ohno, Hijikata’s artistic collaborator.
Unlike other forms of dance, butoh does not depend on a series of steps or movements that can be learned by a dancer and repeated in a performance. Instead Hijikata evolved a set of physical postures and facial expressions. These are not meant to be slavishly imitated but serve as take-off points. Subjects of a butoh dance can be corporeal—an old woman trying to keep a basket of grain balanced on her head fighting a windstorm as she walks—or as insubstantial as the wind and the rain itself.
There is also a mind-development aspect of butoh, requiring intense concentration exercises. That’s why it has sometimes been compared to training for one of Asia’s martial arts. And some have discerned a shamanistic component harkening back to the origins of dance.
The roots of butoh were nourished by an artistic underground that flourished in Tokyo in the early 1950’s, somewhat like the Beatnik movement in the United States. Both were anti-establishment, but expressed their revolt against authority in very different ways. In this post-World War II period, cultural stagnation triggered new ferment. In
Tokyo, a group of dancers, writers and theatrical performers-- including Hijikata and novelist Yukio Mishima-- were entranced by dada and surrealism. Intellectual inputs also came from “walk on the wild side” writers such as the Marquis de Sade, Antonin Artaud, the Comte de Lautreaumont and, especially Jean Genet. All sought to dive into the dark and forbidden.
The branches of butoh, meanwhile, have grown in many directions, going far beyond the basics articulated by Hijikata. Butoh has spawned dance companies throughout the world, including many hybrids of the Japanese original. In “An Art Form in Transition” Don McLeod writes: “Because it gives us a halted, reverberating picture of our muted struggle to be human in this technological age of the disenfranchised body, butoh is ever changing and is here to stay.”
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Jack Egan is a journalist who for over three decades has covered subjects ranging from global business and financial markets to Hollywood and the film industry. As a result of numerous visits, he’s experienced Japan firsthand and written about the country’s economy, society and culture.
Egan served as the New York financial correspondent for the Washington Post, a columnist for New York magazine; an assistant managing editor for U.S. News & World Report, senior editor at Forbes and business editor for special features at Variety. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Below the Line and Director’s Guild of America Quarterly. He can be reached at jsegan@sbcgobal.net